Squawk Box April 8

byaleconApril 8, 2008

This morning’s Squawk Box never made it to second base. In discussing the trends in mobile telephony, we ranged over a variety of different topics ranging from the “all-in-one” swiss army phone, to the importance of the browser, and a whole whole lot more.

After 48 minutes we cut off the call, and said we’d leave the discussion of Google App Engine for another day. Participants also mailed me to say how much they had enjoyed it. So listen in… you will likely enjoy it too!

A couple of comments on the points discussed in today's episode:
1. Many of the mobile devices may be full browser, but :mouse gestures" may not be the same. For example, iPhone does not allow for drag and drop and right mouse click. It is worse because the client information does not indicate this information. So from a page viewing point of view it may be full browser, but from an web application developer point of view, the problem is more.
2. I think the way to accommodate Andy's need for supporting multiple SIMs pointing to the same phone number and also take the service provider's concern is as Ken suggested, the user should indicate the active SIM, either via an explicit action or otherwise.
3. I feel that signaling is not cheap in the mobile environment. Usually the signaling uses different radio channel and the first message uses the so called paging channel which is rather limited. I feel that the carriers should offer access to the paging channel as a service and tariff it accordingly. This will facilitate many of the push services, independent of the carriers.